The Basketball-Shooting Bots of FIRST Robotics NYC

A Robotic Version of March Madness took place Sunday as 66 teams competed in the New York regional of FIRST Robotics. The game: Rebound Rumble, a game of robot hoops that challenged both student and machine.

FIRST Robotics Is Back

FIRST Robotics Is Back

This weekend the Popular Mechanics crew headed down to the Javits Center in Manhattan for the New York regional competition of FIRST, the high school robotics competition that has been going for two decades.

Each year the spirit of gracious professionalism is the same, but the game changes. For 2012, the teams had to build bots to play Rebound Rumble, a sort of robotic basketball game. First, teams form into alliances of three robots on each side. Then the students line up their bots out on the court. During an opening period, the machines have to operate autonomously, shooting basketballs and scoring more points (1, 2, or 3) based on the height of the hoop. When the autonomous period ends, student drivers leap forward and assume remote control of the machines, trying to score more baskets and, in some cases, playing defense to stop the opposing alliance from scoring.

At the conclusion of each match, the robots raced toward the barrier that separates the two sides of the court. There, bridges that wobbled like teeter-totters sat upon an extra bar. The teams tried to score extra points by balancing one, two, or all three cooperating bots upon the bridge—but the bridge was barely big enough to accommodate three FIRST robots, so the final seconds of a match often became a tight squeeze.